No matter what business you are in, growth is most likely one of your main goals. You know that a great part of the continued success of your business is the ability to bring existing customers back and to bring new ones in. How do you do this? Through marketing, of course.

But if you focus only on the marketing aspect, only on the ROI, then you might discover that your business is not growing to your satisfaction.

Growing a business takes more than a simple marketing campaign; it takes the willingness to spend time on relationships. Instead of being driven primarily by the results, take the time to invest in the process of creating true relationships with those around you. When you shift your focus to building relationships rather than marketing, you will be surprised by the results. As you focus on building stronger relationships, you will find that you are also building trust. It may be true that “people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like, and trust,” according to Bob Burg and John David Mann in The Go-Giver. But in an Entrepreneur article, Dixie Gillaspie takes it even further, asserting that “no matter how many people know you, even like you, it’s the people who trust you to put their long-term best interests ahead of your short-term best interests who will always do business with, and refer business to, you.”